In the new Barbie movie, the world's favorite
blonde bombshell is suddenly offered a choice: a classic high heel pump or a Birkenstock
sandal. She, of course, chooses the pump. Let's just say that The Matrix looks very
different here in 2023. But because of that choice we’re treated to this, the moment that
broke the Internet, Barbie stepping out of her heels and retaining that iconic foot shape. But
while that step broke the Internet, would it also break your ankles? I don't think actual human
feet are meant to work that way. So in honor of the new Barbie movie, I want to see whether she
made the right move here. When offered the option of wearing a high heel or a flat sandal, what's
the right choice for your overall health? Today, we're finding our footing to determine once and
for all whether high heels are as bad for your feet as people tend to assume or whether there
might be some secret health benefits to walking around in a perpetual point. And on the flip
side, are flat shoes like sandals any better? Because let me tell you, no one wants
Chronic Foot Pain Barbie, no one. Hello Internet! Welcome to Style Theory. The over
analysis Barbie. At this point, I think we're all aware of who Barbie is, right? Blonde, loves
pink, owns a beach house in Malibu. Sure. But do you know her origins? I bet not because our toy
overlords definitely don't want you to find out. See, the original Barbie would be this;
the Bild Lili Doll, a doll based on a German comic strip that, ah… Well, just
by looking at a couple of these panels, let's just say that you don't need to understand
what the German is saying here to get a sense of Lili's vibe. In the Barbie movie you get
this scene about Ken staying the night. Let's just say that Lili here would have had
some very specific activities planned. Anyway, what started overseas as a risque gag gift found
its home with American children when Ruth Handler, the co-founder of Mattel, bought one for
her daughter. The doll was an instant hit at the house and bing-bang-boom
Barbara Millicent Roberts was born, but she prefers to go by her
nickname, Barbie, for short. Barbie quickly became the original hashtag
Girlboss, teaching women of all ages that they could take on any job they wanted. Doctor, Nobel
Prize Winner, Supreme Court Justice, Mermaid. It's only too bad that Barbie never stopped to
show us what happens when the other shoe drops. Too real TikTok. Too real. Anyway, speaking of
shoes dropping, let's get to that question at hand… at feet, I suppose. The Birkenstock pump
debates. Have we all been brainwashed to think that high heels are only for aesthetics? I mean,
party goers have been ditching their painful stilettos to walk home barefoot for decades.
Heck! our very own Amy walked barefoot through Vegas after her three hour Taytay experience
rather than keep her heels on. But is the true shame coming from that walk of shame, the poor
foot health? Has Barbie's permanent point been trying to help us all along? Or should we be going
flat and never going back? Now, if you're new to the world of heels, you might be surprised that
they didn't actually start off as footwear focused on fashionable females. In fact, they started
off as a tool for soldiers riding their horses. The gap between the toe and the heel actually
helped riders lock their feet into the saddle stirrups. From there, heels became popular
throughout Europe, eventually becoming a symbol of male power. I'm serious about that.
King Louis the 14th, eventually made it so that only nobility could wear heels. And how high those
heels were reflected how high of a class you were. Maybe that's why Ken is still just a Ken
here. He hasn't harnessed the power of the lift yet. But now let's look at the data.
Are heels actually good for your feet? Well, it's not as easy of a question as it might
initially sound. Talk to anyone who's head over heels for heels and they'll be quick to
tell you that they're not all made equally. There's a whole pokédex full of different kinds
of heels out there. You have your ultra high stilettos that turn you into a literal skyscraper,
as well as those insane no-heel heels, all the way down to your maybe-possibly a heel kitten
heels. Meow. So for our non shoe addicts, let's just break down what those names actually mean.
A kitten heel is the shortest of the short heels covering anything below two inches. It's the
kind of shoe that makes you wonder if you're really wearing a heel or finally just standing
up straight. Just above those are low heels, reaching between 2 to 3 inches
in height. Then you have yourself mid-heels that fall between three and four inches.
And finally, we're in the high heel territory, anything between 4 to 8 inches in size. You can
actually manage to find shoes that go higher, including some that are almost fully vertical,
which match really nicely with this clutch as well as this hefty podiatrists bill. That
being said no matter who you are or why you decided to slip on that pair of heels,
they are going to rock your body to its core. Literally. Strapping on a pair of stilettos
turns the simple act of walking into a major challenge for the human body. As the height of
the heel rises, the length of your Achilles tendon actually shortens. You know that little string
that connects your calf muscle to your heel bone? Yeah. That thing becomes super small, which is no
good because it's built for an extended stretch. Keeping it short for long periods
of time reduces its flexibility, ultimately resulting in it becoming tighter and
shorter. Looking past the tendon, high heels force the muscles of your legs to flex, which gives
the wearer an instant booty lift. While that seems like it should be a good thing. It actually
comes at a severe cost: joint stress. Your chest and pelvis are suddenly forced to sit forward,
which means that your butt gets pushed back. This shifts your entire center of gravity
and changes the normal angle of your leg, causing the front of your body to try and
fall forward while making the knees work double time to keep you from face planting
into the ground. That struggle between you and gravity means that 90% of your body
weight is now focused over the balls of your feet instead of being spread evenly across
the larger surface area of your full foot. And because your muscles are now working super
hard to hold you upright, it becomes harder for them to also propel you forward. So in total,
high heels gives us straining muscles, knee pressure and short, stiff tendons. It’s not looking
all that great for Barbie's footwear of choice. So are there any actual benefits to wearing
heels? It turns out that the answer is yes. In fact, a 2015 study found that regular high
heel use increased ankle strength. The study found that balancing on the balls of your feet
all day is basically the equivalent of CrossFit for your ankles. The women in the study would
wear ten centimeters or four inch heels three times a week or more for multiple hours a
day. And with each passing year that they wore the heels, their ankle strength increased.
It’s pretty crazy, right? Just imagine all of us now walking around in high heels, training up our
ankles. I might have skipped a leg day. But you know what day I never skip? Ankle day! Some guy
tries to attack us in a dark alley and we whip out some fancy ankle moves. That right there.
That's the good news. Here comes the bad news. It only worked for three years. Yeah, believe
it or not. But year after year after year, the muscles in and around the ankle area got
stronger until year four, when suddenly that muscle strength took a nosedive. After four
years, they found that their ankle muscles started getting weaker, leaving them more
prone to injury. You see, the consistent heel use resulted in the body's developing muscle
imbalances, resulting in more falls and overall injuries across the rest of their body.
In short, high heels are terrible. so then obviously Barbie would be better
off choosing the flats right? No. The twist here is that wearing shoes
that are completely flat like slides or yes, even some of those casual Birkenstocks aren't any
better. Flat shoes typically have themselves very little protection from the ground below, meaning
that when your foot hits the floor, there's very little there to absorb the shock. As a result,
the thin long ligament in your foot, known as the plantar fascia, ends up taking a lot of the shock.
Over time, this repeated stress on your ligament causes it to inflame, which can lead to conditions
like plantar fasciitis, where you can have a lot of chronic stabbing pain throughout your foot. So
my apologies to Safiya Nygaard, but your favorite shoe choice there is just as guilty as the pump.
So clearly we've created a bit of a dilemma here. The heels are too high and causing severe
muscle issues, but the flats are too low, doing literally nothing to protect our feet from
the pounding of the pavement. What we need is some sort of a goldilocks solution, something
that's just right. And let me tell you, it does exist. But it requires us talking about
the most important factor in the shoe game: your arch. If you have no idea what I'm talking about
it's the inside curve of your foot. According to podiatrists, the shoes that you ultimately
choose to wear should have a slight heel to better support your foot's natural arch. This, in
turn, will put less strain on the Achilles tendon that we talked about earlier. In fact, there's
actually a test to find you your perfect lift. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the
perfect heel formula. Or at least I present it to you after I put you to the test. The
Subscribe Button Test. What other channel on YouTube is going to definitively prove what the
best soap is and then follows it up with a short where we ripped through a $200 pair of sneakers?
Who else is exposing Victoria's Secret and then explaining why you should be absolutely terrified
of mannequins? By subscribing to Style Theory you help support this channel and all the hard
working Barbies out there that help make it happen. So hit that subscribe button and
proudly say that you are a Theorist Barbie. All right, let's go play with our feet.
The so-called perfect heel height formula was created by podiatrist Emma Supple, and it
promises to pair you with your perfect pair of heels. So how does this formula work? Well, you're
essentially measuring the mobility of this one little ankle bone here; your talus bone. According
to Emma, quote: “Basically, if the talus tilts downward when you're holding your leg out straight
and relaxing your foot, then you have a lot of mobility and can wear higher heels with ease.
But if your talus doesn't tilt, then you'll be more comfortable in flatter shoes. Flatter shoes
give a right angle to the ground and don't require as much movement from the foot.” So now grab
yourself a friend and get to measuring. Luckily, I have myself my built-in friend, my wife
Steph. I mean, she quite literally promised to be my partner in all things till I died.
Though I got to admit, I'm not sure she knew it meant measuring my feet on camera. Anyway,
once you have someone willing to get up close and personal with your stank feet, you'll just need
to find yourself a chair, a pencil and a ruler. Just pause this video while you go find the tools.
All right? Great. First, you'll need to sit on the chair with one leg extended out in front of you.
Remember, you're going to want to have your shoes off for all of this. Gently relax your foot so
that it tips forward without actively pointing your toe. Have your friend then line up the pencil
with the ball of your foot so that way it points perpendicular to the floor. Basically, you want
the pencil to make a right angle to the ground. By measuring the distance between the tip of the
pencil and your heel, you'll be able to tell what heel height is meant for you. It is possible
for your foot not to tip, thereby making the measurement zero. That is totally fine. All that
means is that you have yourself a flat arch and so flatter shoes like vans or ballet flats are
going to be a match made in shoe heaven for you. So what about the rest of us? Well, if your foot
measures that one inch then a shoe with a one inch heel is going to feel the best. If you measure
two inches, then you're going to want a two inch heel. I think you get the picture, this is not a
complicated equation. Anything three inches and above, though, rounds down to just three inches.
Basically, podiatrists don't want you going any higher than that. So what does all of
this mean for a leading lady, Barbie? Well, it turns out that her affinity for heels might
not be as unhealthy as we initially assumed. Sure, her heels are way too high in those shoes, but she
just has herself a more flexible talus than most, thereby making a higher heel a
better fit for her unique arch. She just needs to dial it down by a
couple of inches. In the end, though, all of this shoe talk tells us that footwear
isn't a red pill blue pill scenario. It isn't a binary choice. There are millions of shoes out
there, and the one that's right for you isn't the tallest or the sleekest. It's about finding a
fit that meets the specific needs of your body. Speaking of bodily needs, it's time to talk about
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just a theory, A STYLE THEORY! Keep looking sharp.
